Good Hours
by Robert Frost
Explication
Robert Frost invariably writes of
rural scenes: forests, open space, farms and villages. The poem “Good Hours” fits this pattern as
the speaker reports his walk out of the village on a winter evening. The poem consists of four quatrains of
rhyming couplets. The over-all mood of
the poem is a mixture of melancholy and pleasure. The speaker is alone, but not lonely. He is acutely aware of the inhabitants of
this
Notice that
the speaker claims that “I thought I had the folk within.” He realizes that his glimpses, however
pleasurable and insightful, should not be mistaken for knowing and
understanding these simple folk. He is
an outsider and in this line reminds himself of this limitation. There is a definite mood shift in the poem
that takes place in line 13: “I turned and repented, but coming back/I saw no
window but that was black.” A darkness
of spirit invades the poem to accompany the darkness of the night, as candles
were extinguished and the villagers had gone to bed. The speaker has now moved from his aloneness
to more of a sense of isolation, if not loneliness. He is now aware of how silent the streets are
and how much noise his feet make as they creek in the snow. He has gone from an observer of life, the
typical place for a poet, to a disturber of life. If he were not walking alone at
Frost is over-stating the case a bit here. He titles his poem “Good Hours” and though he accuses himself of disturbing the peace, the reader comes to appreciate the pleasurable mix of sadness and joy that is often the best moments in life for a poet. There is a deep longing for these moments and a melancholy pleasure in recalling them in his verse.